image: stationwagonforums.com
While researching my ’66 Thunderbird piece, I ran across this interesting “Thunderbird Squire” on stationwagonforums.com. This is not a Photoshop, by the way, but a real car. Considering how well the Thunderbird sold compared with the LTD II coupes, I wonder how much better a T-Bird Country Squire would have done than the LTD II Squire?
Hey, Mercury essentially did the same thing with their Cougar Villager, so how hard could it have been? Personally, I think the T-Bird’s hidden headlights not only look nicer than the production LTD II Squire’s stacked quad lights, but quite similar to the full-size LTD Country Squire.
Who knows, the T-Bird Squire might have done quite well if marketed as a personal luxury wagon, with standard bucket seats and console. It could have been just the thing for country club moms–at least until the Minivan Era began.
T-Bird wagon would have had purists head explode even worse than the actual Cougar wagon. LOL Making a T-Bird out of an LTD II is easy, just swap front header panel and hood.
Imagine wagons of Monte Carlo, Grand Prix, or even Firebird!
You also have to add all the vacuum plumbing for the hidden headlights, I think you also have to change the front bumper and the filler behind it. I changed my Ranchero to a Cougar, passed on the T-Bird conversion because of all the vacuum hardware nightmare, lines, accumulator, headlight switch, etc..
A Thunderbird wagon? Really? The car that defined the personal luxury market, with three row seating and wood on the side? Makes about as much sense as a Porsche SUV.
Considering the Cayenne is Porsche’s best-selling and probably most profitable model, this very well could have been a great move for Ford.
Then again, the Blackwood wasn’t such a good idea…
Wouldn’t be hard to add a “basket handle” aluminum “applique” with opera “windowlette” to the C-pillar to complete the effect.
No.
That is one ugly wagon. It manages to combine every bad styling element of the 70s and put it all on one hideous car. Very appropriate that “Phaeton” “Continental” and “Coach” are in three different fonts; after all, the car itself is a similar mishmash.
The Wagon Queen Family Truckster comes to mind.
I’ve always wanted to do this to a Ranchero. It’s a natural.
A Thunderbird Squire with 4 doors ? Something just should be wrong ) What about this one ?
Now you’re talking. 🙂
On closer inspection, it is an interesting idea, but just doesn’t come together very well.
That’s just plain wrong.
I just happened upon another bullet-Bird wagon conversion for sale on Hemmings. At least this one stays truer to the original lines of the car, in my opinion. Also, the bodywork isn’t made of wood.
http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2012/08/30/hemmings-find-of-the-day-1962-ford-thunderbird/
Wow, a Vista Bird! I like it.
Here’s another squire takeoff on a T-Bird. I think this one is too much.
This is the best looking one of these we have seen. The squarer lines of the flairbird seem more adaptable to a wagon’s roof. The suicide doors and wood paneling make it all the better.
Hey, we did a post on that one here!
http://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/what-if-1964-thunderbird-squire/
The 77 Thunderbird could not have been any less of a Thunderbird (unless we are going to consider the 80-82) so I say what the heck. Any lipstick that Ford could have put on the piggish 72 Torino wagon could certainly have helped. In fact, I am surprised that they exercised such restraint by not doing so.
Cutlasses at Oldsmobile, Cougars at Mercury and Thunderbirds at Ford. Same difference.
There were Cutlass wagons since the 60’s up through the last Cutlass Ciera; Vista-Cruisers are classics. Cutlasses weren’t just 2 doors, and there were 4 door Supremes 60s to 80s.
But Thunderbird’s and Cutlass’s original missions were quite different.
Thunderbird was a “personal car”…Cutlass was the top series of Olds’ F-85 that branched into “personal luxury”.
You do realize that the 1972-76 T-Birds were essentially built on stretched Torino chassis? Same goes for the Lincoln Mark IV and V’s of the 1970’s. And the Torino frame shared almost it’s entire front suspension with the fullsize Fords of this era (dating back to 1965). Ford was really good at reusing platforms for many different cars.
Next please. Not a fan of 70s Fords, especially `luxury’ wagons.
Changing the front clips seems to be a relatively easy proposition.
I’ve seen an actual Comanchero (1965 Comet/Ranchero). I’ve seen a Thundero (?) a 78 T-Bird/Ranchero on the internet.
There are a lot of combos to be done!
An improvement for sure!
I’m pretty sure the front of the LTD II is why I’m afraid of Clowns.
To me the LTD II just looks lazily designed.
“Rectangular headlights are legal this year. We should work them in on this car. Any ideas?”
“Stack ’em!”
“Sounds good. Let’s take the afternoon off.”
Needs suicide doors! And a barn-door tailgate! And a light-up Lucite landau bar!
Thundercougerfalconbird-
Lol
They didn’t call these wagons clap traps for nothing.
Make mine a T’Bird 4 seater though.
Win!
haha – some of my fondest memories include an LTD wagon.
It could be interesting to see if some attempted to put the 1972-76 T-bird front end at a 1972-76 Torino wagon? …Now I wonder how Starsky & Hutch’s Gran Torino would had look with a T-bird front end? 😉
The Gran Torino is the odd one out when it comes to sheetmetal contours.. The 1972-76 Montego, 1974-79 Cougar, the Elite, and 1977-79 T-Birds and LTD IIs all line up.
No way does big ‘Bird sheetmetal line up with the above listed intermediates.
I guess I’m in the minority here but the Thunderbird front end looks good to me and is a huge improvement over the LTD II. Usually cars look best stock as their maker originally built them but this looks like it could have come from the factory this way.
Good looking… sort of the Brougham-tastic pinnacle of Brougham-iness…
This will be heresy to some but I doubt a T-Bird wagon produced in the 70’s era would have sparked much demand as there were no discernable difference between Ford’s big cars which were largely innocuous, indistinguishable slabs. If produced, it should have had a stand alone design of its own.
It would have had the wrong image.
Anyone remember the TV Detective-series era? Cannon…Barnaby Jones…Mannix. Youthful middle-aged men, still virile, very well off…no family (most of them)…they needed a PERSONAL car. For a MATURE (so they thought) persona.
Hence the Marks by Lincoln. And the lower-priced knockoffs: the Bird, the Full Monte, Grand Pricks. Non of them were “sporting” – they weren’t supposed to be. They were to advertise wealth; and lack of attachment.
The suicide Bird didn’t do that; and so it was culled. And a Bird wagon…oh, how gauche!! The family man who didn’t know it was time to grow up.
You’re absolutely right. Technically, it would have been five minutes of updating the parts routing and coding on the lines. Marketing-wise…a dead end.
Why did the wagons keep the old Gran Torino/Montego styling, unlike the coupes and sedans?
Cost.
It would have cost too much to develop a low-volume wagon body with the updated side-sculpting and structural changes behind it. It suggests the Ford people knew that the Torino-based LTDII/Cougar/T-Bird weren’t long for this world and that the wagons weren’t going to be hot sellers.
Which of course they weren’t. So instead of adding to the cost of the line by putting out complementary wagons, they just kept some of the old Montego tooling around to make the wagons. Not unlike how Chevrolet made Vega wagons as Monzas long after the other Vegas had gone dark. It filled a void in the sales catalog with minimal cost.
It was a one-year only style, technically replaced by the Fairmont-Zephyr wagons the next year.
Okay, this just hit me, as we’re going ’round about a four-door Mustang and how a “shooting brake” Mustang might have worked. Could THIS thing have been morphed into a sportwagon?
And, what would it have taken? The obvious answer is two doors, but that’s not practical in a car this size. Would it have taken different lines on the side? Perhaps a single driver’s side door and a suicide rear-door on the curb side, such as with the Honda Element? (yes, it has four doors, I know.)
Or, is it just that the body is too big for the sportwagon genre? (Me, I think that’s obvious.) But at the same time, as a personal-luxury car, the Torino-Bird was a winner.
Just the vagaries of imagery? A big coupe for a single user is fine, but a big wagon, not so? For the wealthy bachelor, a SMALL wagon? The mind boggles.
Building on Sean the Omni’s point, I think any one of these front ends is hideous enough to use as a Halloween mask!
High-Brougham-Era Fords exist only to make the Other Two’s designs look clean and sensible.
I’ll say this.. It does make the wagon look smallish and tidy. Much more so than the ungainly 19 foot long nose they saddled it with near the end with the quad square lights.
I myself like the ’77-79 T-Bird frontend and I think it looks right at home on that LTD II Squire wagon and I’ve seen a lot put on the Ranchero too.. They all shared the same frame but also shared other parts as well like the front fenders and wheelwells, dashboards and gauge clusters, Seats, floorboards, some glass, engines and transmissions and rearends and a host of other parts. The doors on all the 2 doors were not exactly the same but still interchangeable as well as the 4-doors on the 4 door models were too. Same with the front bumpers, slightly different but interchangeable. You could combine any of the 72-76 Torino, ’74-76 Ford Elite, ’77-’79 LTD II, ’77-79 T-Bird, ’72-79 Ranchero, 72-76 Mercury Montego and Cyclone and the ’74-79 Mercury Cougar frontend parts from one to the other with no major modifications other than switching parts and bolting them together. You could very easily have a ’77-79 T-bird frontend on a ’76 Torino or a ’74 Cougar frontend on a ’79 Ranchero. How about a ’74-76 Ford Elite frontend on a Cougar Villager Squire wagon? and call it a Ford Squire Elite ??? How about a Mercury Cyclone frontend on a Ranchero and call it a Cyclero. The possibilities are almost endless. Here’s some pics of a few unique Ranchero swaps
http://forum.grantorinosport.org/clip-swap_topic3335.html
It’s funny that I found this article. I actually built and still have this Thunderbird wagon. It was kind of a joke car I did for the 2005 Thunderbird VTCI convention. It is a 1977 Ford LTD II, with a 1978 Thunderbird grill/headlight assembly and hood bolted onto it. I need to paint it one solid color, but it drives great and get lots of double takes from those old enough to know that Thunderbird didn’t make a Wagon!. I also attached the 1964 Thunderbird hood letters attached along the center of the tailgate.
More pictures of the “Thunderbird Squire”. I had a soft spot for this old wagon, as it was similar to one I grew up with. My parents had a ’77 Mercury Montego MX Wagon and with the exception of the instruments and grille assembly it was identical.
Anyway, it got alot of attention and the guys at the Thunderbird Convention got a kick out of it.
Nice to hear from you! You have a cool wagon.
I’ve always liked the late ’70s midsized Fords. My maternal grandparents had a triple-jade LTD II sedan, my paternal grandmother had a ’77 T-Bird (black with white interior) and my aunt had a ’78 T-Bird (midnight blue with chamois interior).
I worked on the assemblyline at Ford’s Chicago assembly plant in 1977-79 building those T-birds. I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for them. I’ve already owned a few of them and now I’m wishing I could find a nice cherry 1978-’79 T-bird in Black or Maroon/Burgundy metallic with factory T- Roof ( only about 600 made with T-roof for each year 78-79) and bucket seats with center console & shifter. Maybe a Town Landau or a Heritage. If you got one to sell, let me know. I’d like to get a mid to late 70’s Ranchero too and do some swapping of frontends on the Ranchero to match the Bird. That’s going to be my next project after I sell my one owner 39K ’79 F-250 4×4 full custom showtruck. Anyone want a custom truck ? or trade me for your low mileage T-Top T-Bird. Open to all offers..